Survival
by Hamner
Summary: It was just supposed to be a camping trip, but I got lost and crazy things are happening. I just want to get back home.


I was just an average kid. How clichéd. Let's start over. I was pretty normal overall for a city kid. My parents both worked for large corporations, I went to school, and the pet purrloin stayed in the house sunbathing all day or something.

Well, some of that changed one day. I'll give you a hint. My parents still work for the corporations, but they've been promoted... I think. I never really paid too much attention to their actual job descriptions. I just know that Dad works as a developer for a pokéball company called Silph Co. (this is somewhat relevant), and Mom is a programmer for GameFreak (No idea what that company does though).

So, for my 18th birthday, I got a pokéball that wasn't in production yet and was told only to use it for something very special. At the time I thought _that's never going to happen, I'm not a trainer_ but I kept it to myself. My mom got me a new computer, which I had much more use for than the pokéball. Looking back, I should have been much more thankful to my dad.

Well, let's start off at the beginning of my unplanned adventure.

* * *

><p>"See ya Connor," my dad said as he left for work, "Have a good camping trip. Don't let Ebony out to play in the mud!" He winked.<p>

"Nah, she'll probably want to go swimming instead," I joked back, "See ya."

After eating an awesome meal of Pop tarts, I grabbed my gear and Ebony's Pokéball. Looking at the status screen I sighed and resigned myself to sneaking around the house holding pokétreats.

After finally catching the reluctant purrloin and receiving some bite marks for my efforts, I was finally off to catch the bus to the school.

It was the topic of conversation for the last couple weeks, the graduation camping trip. It would be an exciting week filled with tracking, hiking, campfires, battling, sleeping in tents, and, best of all, shenanigans with my friends. Most kids my age have their own pokémon by now, but that has never really appealed to me. I wanted to follow in my parents footsteps and have a much more stationary lifestyle. I was planning on going to university and study some sort of science, probably chemistry, but... you'll see what happened.

Getting there was no problem, the bus trip was the easiest part. We were all dropped off at the trainer station after the bridge and it was all walking from there. The supervisors were assigned to groups of students. Most of my friends were part of my group, and one of their parents was the supervisor.

We joked and talked along the way to the designated camping area. It took a couple of hours to walk the whole way, I think some of the teachers either came early, or flew on their pokémon because they already had the camp set up and the tenting areas marked out. My group almost managed to get the farthest corner, but instead we ended up next to the group that did.

The first couple days were pretty average, but still very exciting. The weather was great for star gazing the first night, we ate a ton of junk food, practically stayed up all night, did some small pranks on some other friends, and all in all had a great start to what we thought was going to be a great week. The next day was stifling, so most of the day was spent in the water. It was the third day that the problems started. It began to rain.

By nightfall it was practically raining purrloin and lillipup. We didn't have a campfire and ended up huddled inside our tents, attempting to dry off, but the floor was damp. No one in our tent had a fire pokémon, so we had to make do with the warmth of the ones we did have.

Ebony was not happy with the suggestion of even being outside in the tent and immediately put herself back in the ball. I shrugged, my friends knew what she was like. So in the end we huddled up with an oshawott, a patrat, and an audino. I'd say the audino was the warmest.

Somewhere around midnight it stopped raining. However, that's only because it began snowing instead. It was summer. Obviously something was happening. Unfortunately, by then, I really had to pee. So I wrapped myself inside my sleeping bag, which was frozen by now anyways and wasn't going to make me any colder. Anyways, I had replaced it with blankets packed inside an item ball so it didn't matter. I went off towards the outhouse, following the faint light of it in the distance.

Somehow I must have been turned around on the way, I now suspect someone's litwick escaped. It was taking much longer than it should have to get to the stupid out house. I decided to just pee outside. I would have done so in the beginning if I hadn't wanted the chance to warm up inside an actual building. It was only after I finished that I realized that I had no idea where the tent was. I had no idea where I was. Later I would find out that I left 10 minutes before the supervisors came to the tent to teleport everyone back home. They did wait for me to come back, but when I didn't they figured someone must have seen me on the way to the outhouse and teleported me. It was about an hour later that they discovered that no one had checked me off the list and by then the snow was coming down too hard to search. After three days of intensive searching, they practically gave up.

It was cold, and the snow was coming down harder than before. I knew I needed shelter, but there was nothing around. I was getting really cold and there wasn't much I could do about it. I'd packed more clothes, but they were in my pack which was still in the tent. I wrapped my hands in my sleeve and started piling snow against a tree and packed it down as much as I could until I had a reasonable size. Then I started digging a hole into it to make a temporary shelter. I was desperate and lucky. That's my only explanation as to why I survived. Also, you wouldn't expect it, but snow is a decent insulator. Once I was inside I made the sleeping bag become the floor for me to lay on, but also so I could convince Ebony to stay out of the ball and keep me warm.

I released her and quickly hid the ball, "Ebony, I need you to stay out and help keep me warm. It's an emergency."

She looked at me indignantly and meowed resentfully.

"I know. You don't listen to me. I wouldn't be asking unless it was a dire situation. I can't find the camp. We're lost. It'd also be nice of you could make sure to dig out an air hole if the entrance get's covered up?" I asked, not expecting an actual response.

Ebony blinked, glared, and then nodded her head. She had never done anything of the sort to me before. In fact, she had never given any hint that the understood a word I was saying.

Once I was warm enough to not worry about freezing to death, I allowed myself to fall asleep. Ebony did end up having to dig air holes a couple times. We managed to make it through the night.

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><p>Author's Note: Well, tell me what you think. Even if its "I hate you flameflameflame." I'm still not entirely sure where I'm going with this story, I have a general direction, but I can't figure out the specifics. Uhhh, I don't know what elsde to put. This and all future chapters are subject to my whims on editing, but I doubt any edits made will be major.<p> 


End file.
